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" One of the writers I most admire is Hilary Mantel because in the middle of her career, she just changed paths entirely and became just a totally different novelist. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Because
Career
Her
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" I always wanted to be a scientist. I don't really have any writer friends. "
Hanya Yanagihara
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" There comes a point when you're writing a novel when you're in it so deep that the life of the novel becomes more real to you than life itself. You have to write your way out of it; once you're there, it's too late to abandon. "
Hanya Yanagihara
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You
" If the only thing you knew about Oman was its location, you might never go at all. "
Hanya Yanagihara
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" Friendship is one of our most treasured relationships, but it isn't codified and celebrated; it's never going to give you a party. "
Hanya Yanagihara
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" One of the fun things about unreliable narrators is they can be funny. You can admire things about them and laugh with them. "
Hanya Yanagihara
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" There's something nice and intimate about having a book. You know that someone's actually gone on this journey. You know that someone has actually researched and reported all these things. You can see and hear their tone in what they chosen to include and what they haven't. "
Hanya Yanagihara
You
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Nice
" It's a funny thing about cities: Some have brief, bright moments of cultural and political dominance, decades- or centuries-long spells when they seem the center of their particular nation, or region, or empire... only to later fall into obscurity and disrepair, never to regain their former glory. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Fall
Political
Nation
" Be aware of who in your life is actually interested in hearing you discuss your writing, and who's just asking to be polite. Listening to writers talk about their work is often excruciatingly dull. "
Hanya Yanagihara
You
Writing
Work
" The first thing I do whenever I go to Thailand is seek out the closest restaurant or stall selling mango-and-sticky rice: it's a little hillock of glutinous rice drenched in lashings of coconut milk and served with fresh mango. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Milk
Fresh
Restaurant
" When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible. "
Hanya Yanagihara
You
Never
Possible
" What makes a fulfilling relationship or fulfilling life is not simply found in another. It's found in a group of others. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Relationship
Found
Group
" I wanted to see how flavors, spices, and grains traveled back and forth along the Silk Road and were interpreted by a multitude of cultures' palates. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Road
Cultures
See
" In a basic sense, 'A Little Life' is a homage to how my friends and I live our lives. I wanted to push past the definitions of how we typically define friendship. It's a different version of adulthood, but it's no less important and no less legitimate than anyone else's. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Past
Life
Friendship
" Kashmir, the 86,000-square-mile region in India's north, both is and isn't the India of the popular imagination. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Kashmir
India
Imagination
" The process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist, because science is so reactionary. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Science
More
Process
" From 1999 through 2001, I was an editor at a now-defunct magazine about the media industry called 'Brill's Content' that eventually merged with a now-defunct website about the media industry called Inside.com. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Media
Website
Content
" Go to any Shinto temple in Japan and you'll see it: a simple stand from which hang hundreds of wooden postcard-size plaques with a colorful image on one side and, on the other, densely scribbled Japanese characters in black felt-tip pen, pleas to the gods for help or succor. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Help
Black
Simple
" Writing is, by its nature, interior work. So being forced to be around people is a great gift for a novelist. You get to be reminded, daily, of how people think, how they speak, how they live; the things they worry about, the things they hope for, the things they fear. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Hope
Work
Nature
" I think at first I didn't tell anyone I was writing something because I found so tedious the people who did. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Think
Tell
People
" Part of adulthood is searching for the people who understand you. "
Hanya Yanagihara
You
People
Searching
" Every traveler knows too well the endless quest for the perfect travel bag: the one that's stylish enough to carry through Paris, sturdy enough to tote around Peru, and - most important - doesn't make your shoulder sag even before you've loaded it up with everything you need for a day of sightseeing. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Perfect
Bag
Day
" We imbue deserts and the tundra with menace because nothing, or little, grows there. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Little
Nothing
Because
" I think that all research scientists think of themselves as belonging to a grand tradition, building on work that has been worked on since the very beginning of science itself. Whereas I'm not sure writers think of themselves in the same way. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Work
Beginning
Science
" Where most of the country is, well, hot - from the bone-baking dry heat of the desert to the flesh-melting humidity of Kerala in the south - Kashmir is cool: so cool, in fact, that in the winter, the temperatures can sink to sub-zero. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Winter
Hot
Cool
" When we think of India, most of us are in fact thinking of Rajasthan, that large splotch of dun-colored desert in the country's northwest which, from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, was ruled by a succession of maharajas whose sense of color, opulence, and splendor created the most enduring images of India in the West. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Color
Thinking
Think
" I think anything goes in fiction as long as it fits within the interior logic of the work itself and is presented in a disciplined manner. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Long
Logic
Goes
" Although both of us were raised on Oahu, in Honolulu, my mother has always had fond memories of Maui; this was, after all, where she and my father, then penniless yet oddly optimistic newlyweds, honeymooned in 1969. "
Hanya Yanagihara
She
Always
Memories
" I'd be far too self-conscious and insecure if I suspected my editor might be a better novelist than I. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Better
Far
Insecure
" Between their rise in the thirteenth century and their sudden fall in the seventeenth, when the line abruptly ended, the Medicis produced three popes, two queens, and many Florentine rulers, and they supported the work of Galileo, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Botticelli - a veritable parade of geniuses. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Two
Fall
Three
" The nice thing about publishing later in life is that you already know who you are. You don't have to hang out with the 'Paris Review' crowd to try to make yourself feel like a legitimate writer. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Know
Life
You